Aberration correction for SLM-generated Bessel beams propagating through tilted interfaces

It is known that an axicon forms an aberrated Bessel beam when the input light is incident at an oblique angle, and the aberration can be removed by adding ellipticity to the axicon. The present work shows that the approach does not recover the Bessel beam along its entire depth of field when an additional tilted optical window is present in the beam path. This situation is increasingly common in advanced applications, where the sample may reside between two glass slides, within a vacuum chamber, or in a gas-tight enclosure. An improved method is introduced in which a single phase map on a spatial light modulator is used to generate the Bessel beam and compensate for both the aberration caused by oblique incidence (equivalent to the tilted axicon) and that due to an additional tilted optical window. Beam-quality metrics are used to quantify the effectiveness of the new method. This work extends the applicability of Bessel beams to other modes of fabrication, imaging, and signal processing.